Malaysia, new beginnings

Having taken the most empty plane we've both ever been on, we arrived at Kuala Lumpur International Airport number 1. Kuala Lumpur is a pretty incredible city and it's growing faster and faster. It's two airports that are side by side are growing at the same rate, and what used to be a humble little airport, to our surprise, was now two mega buildings connected by a train line, with massive duty free, entertainment, facilities etc. A lot of progress since the last time I was here.

No Bromo

From Semarang we took a train to Surabaya. Although we spent two nights there, I only took these two photos.

Surabaya?

Surabaya train station accidental selfie

We basically spent our time in Surabaya enjoying what city life had to offer. We stayed in a cheap 2-star chain hotel called Pop! to recover from all the rock solid beds and crappy showers we’d been experiencing so far. One of Surabaya’s calls to fame, apart from the recent terrorist bombing, is its ridiculously large shopping malls. We visited two of them. One we went to on our first night to have a food court dinner. I don’t think its really fair calling it a food court dinner because the food court is actually a bunch of pretty nice restaurants, just all in the one building instead of a long a street. The other mall we went to was where we spent most of our full day in Surabaya.

Semarang and so on

Following our escape from the Animal farm, we got on a local bus and had a very cheap and yet incredibly comfortable ride up to a city by the north coast of Java, Semarang. It seems that the town we were in, Ambawara, is somewhat considered part of Semarang, as the bus we were on was a city commuter bus – ie lots of standing room, air conditioned, and men have to sit down the back. We’d booked a hotel in Semarang already, so we conveniently could just stay on the same bus as it drove around the city and got off as close as possible to our hotel with a 20-30 minute walk afterwards.

Pimped out bicycles to ride around the square

After checking in to the hotel, we headed out for some dinner. Our hotel was actually in a bit of an awkward spot and we had a pretty hard time finding food

Indonesian Animals

Before leaving Ambarawa where we had, by most accounts, had a pretty good time; we had one last stop recommended to us to check out. A little place by the name of ‘Cimory on the Valley’. Those who haven’t been in Indonesia likely wouldn’t of heard of Cimory. Cimory is a widely popular milk brand in Indonesia. I’m not sure who they’re owned by or what else they own, but their wide spread of dairy products can be found in large supermarkets to small corner stores. Having been in Indonesia a little while now, we had definitely seen and consumed this brand, and a place called Cimory on the Valley sounds really nice.

Temples on the Hill

On our last night in Jogjakarta, we booked a so called travel car to an arbitrary place in the direction we wanted to travel – North. The travel car concept was something we learned from a good Samaritan who had previously given us a lift. He gave us magic words in Bahasa Indonesian to type into google to find cheap and direct minivans that would take us from door to door between close but not too close cities. Our destination was Ambarawa, a small village on a large lake almost directly north of Jogja, halfway to the North coast of Java.